Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCU), the largest health board in Wales has partnered with ‘Better’ to deliver an electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system to digitise the lifecycle of a prescription.
The ePMA Better Meds system will replace paper-based processes with digital workflows across 40+ hospital and community sites to manage a patient’s medication record and prescribe medications.
Through the major digital implementation, BCU will improve the way patients, clinicians, and pharmacy teams prescribe and manage medicines for more than 700,000 people across six counties in North Wales.
Digitising these workflows will make prescribing far more efficient and effective and will drive improvements in patient safety and medicine management governance, along with reducing medicine administration expenditure.
By providing timely access to a patient’s medicine record and allergy information, the health board expects to reduce the risk of errors while transcribing. Overall, transcribing time is forecast to reduce due to clinical data being made available and shared electronically which will release time to care. The reduction of paper will also support environmental initiatives BCU is working towards.
Mandy Jones, Deputy Executive Director of Nursing and Senior Responsible Officer at BCU said: “This is an important project because it is the first stage in our electronic health record strategy. It will transform services across our hospitals to streamline processes for the benefit of patients and staff.
"We've taken a user-centred design approach and brought together a team of clinicians, nurses, and pharmacy staff who have engaged with users across many of our services to get their input into how this is going to work.
“We are one of the first in Wales to start this work, which will support Digital Health and Care Wales’ programme. These wider Welsh Government initiatives will support breaking through organisational boundaries and create a shared medicines record across Wales. We will be working closely with the national team and other health boards to share learnings and insights to achieve the wider national objectives.”
Adrian Aggett, Client Director, Better UK & Ireland, said: “We’re thrilled to be supporting BCU as it kicks off its comprehensive digital strategy with EPMA. The patient safety improvements and efficiency gains are incredibly high meaning it will make a big difference in the initial stages of BCU’s digital plans.
“We will be working closely to ensure it strengthens care collaboration, facilitates a full overview of the patient medication record and integrates with the EHR system to achieve the highly anticipated benefits for patient care and efficiency.”
The health board has recently entered the implementation phase of the project and is working at pace with Better to deploy the new system by March 2026.
